Guns don't kill people?

You wake up in the middle of the night and hear someone in the hallway. You are certain it's a robbery. What do you do?

1. Take the loaded gun from the drawer and shoot the first chance you get?2. Leave the loaded gun in the drawer and pick up a candlestick?

Option number one:

Brunelle said 62-year-old John Tabutt told investigators he thought he heard an intruder, got his gun and fired at a figure in the hallway. It was his live-in girlfriend, 62-year-old Nancy Dinsmore, who family members say he was going to marry Saturday during a small ceremony. Tabutt said he thought she was next to him in bed the whole time.

Option number two: You approach slowly and is just about to whack the intruder over the head when she turns around goes "What are you doing with that candlestick, dear?" You go back to bed and get married the next day.

Guns don't kill people, but they do make it a hell of a lot easier for people to kill people.

Pleiotropy comes from the Greek πλείων pleion, meaning "more", and τρέπειν trepein, meaning "to turn, to convert". It designates the occurrence of a single gene affecting multiple traits, and is a hugely important concept in evolutionary biology.

I'm a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara.

All Many aspects of evolution interest me, but my research focus is currently on microbial evolution, adaptive radiation, speciation, fitness landscapes, epistasis, and the influence of genetic architecture on adaptation and speciation.